New year, new jobs data. Today, the first jobs report of 2025 gives us a comprehensive picture of how workers fared in the economy in all of 2024. Overall, many macroeconomic indicators – unemployment, jobs added and earnings – remained robust through the end of 2024. The gains have been positive throughout 2024 and continued to be at the close of the year, finishing out with an overall unemployment rate of 4.1 percent, 256,000 new jobs in December, and earnings up 1.3 percent after accounting for inflation.
Women continued the long economic recovery from the early days of COVID-19, adding almost 1 million jobs in 2024; however this only accounted for 44 percent of all jobs added last year, down from 54 percent in 2023. Additionally, record numbers of prime-age women – those ranging in age from 25-54 – joined the labor force, reaching 78.4 percent in August 2024 and remaining at historically high levels since. Mixed in with the positive signals, there are some warning signs for a cooling economy that could hit women particularly hard in 2025.
When policymakers are trying to decide what economic policies to enact in order to encourage GDP growth, they generally look at two things: inflation and how close we are to what economists call “maximum employment.” We’ve all heard about and experienced the effect of inflation, or how fast prices rise, over the past few years. Maximum employment is a theoretical concept that tries to measure if everyone who wants a job has a job – but without inflation going up, and with allowances for the time it takes to find a new job. So the threshold for maximum employment allows for a certain level of unemployment: currently this threshold corresponds to an unemployment rate of about 4 percent. But aggregate numbers can be deceiving and lead to policies that don’t help everyone.
While men and women as a whole have remained at maximum employment on average over each year from 2022 through 2024, Black women, Latinas, American Indian/Alaskan Native women and multiracial women saw their unemployment rates stay above this level in 2024; this means allowing workers in these groups to suffer these harmful unemployment rates all of last year was a policy choice by not addressing the structural barriers to their achievement of full employment, such as a lack of paid family and medical leave. In fact, policymakers are harming our GDP growth by not making their data analysis and policy prescriptions intersectional.
Additionally, unemployment rates for all groups of women of color were higher in 2024 than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, except for Black women, where they are equal at a too-high 5.6 percent. Inequities persist for groups who are systematically excluded from full economic participation on racial, disability, immigration, and educational status lines. Data for women 16 and older show that unemployment rates in 2024 for American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) women, Latinas, Black women and multiracial women were each over 5 percent in 2024, compared to 3.5 percent for white women. Additionally, NHPI women reached 4.0 percent unemployment in 2024, and Asian women saw almost a full percentage point jump from 2.6 percent in 2023 to 3.5 percent in 2024.
In 2024, disabled women experienced double the unemployment and had lower participation rates than their non-disabled peers. While disabled women’s employment was at a record high in 2023, their unemployment rate never dipped below 4 percent and has been rising since 2022. And other groups of economically marginalized women, including women with high school degrees, no college and immigrant women, saw elevated unemployment rates in 2024 compared to 2019.
As we head into a second Trump administration, our thoughts are turning to what we might be able to expect for women and the economy going into the next two years. Will women be able to participate fully in the economy? How will women break through the plateau of women’s economic progress that we’ve seen over the past few years with an administration not willing to fully invest in us?
Unfortunately, the policies the incoming administration is foregrounding would further entrench the structural barriers impeding women’s economic progress rather than addressing them. These policies would harm women workers:
- Project 2025 shows us that the Republican trifecta will look to eliminate the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program (OFCCP) and defang the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), making it more difficult for women, especially women of color, to be protected from broad discriminatory practices by employers and to be protected from broad as well as targeted discriminatory practices by employers. We also expect to see historic civil rights laws undermined through expanded religious exemptions to exempt employers from anti-discrimination protections, allowing for discrimination against women to flourish.
- Broad tariffs, or a tax on imported goods, of 10-25 percent have been proposed, which would be passed on to consumers, picking up where inflation left off. This could particularly affect the leisure and hospitality sector, made up of 52.2 percent women, as 15 percent of food is imported and the narrow profit margins of restaurants are sensitive to consumer price shocks.
- Extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and even increasing their provisions would continue to prioritize tax cuts for billionaires and corporations over policies to invest in women and families, such as a national paid family and medical leave program. Investing in caregiving work that we all rely on is one of the most significant ways lawmakers can help workers and families.
- The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is expected to take a pro-employer swing, especially because the Democrats failed to cement a two-year majority on the NLRB board. This will likely mean more barriers to unionization and a blunting of the union upswing led by Black and Latina women.
- Rollback of worker protections from Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL) and deep cuts to the Wage and Hour Division’s (WHD) budget for enforcement from a Republican-controlled Congress may make it easier for employers to get away with wage theft, which is a problem that already disproportionately affects women.
We’ll be here every month to track the jobs data and monitor how the new administration’s policies affect women. And we’ll also be watching for any data irregularities or manipulations that might arise, whether purposeful or due to decreased funding and staffing for essential surveys. Unfortunately, NHPI women, AIAN and multiracial women will be left out of the economic conversation until next January, because the monthly survey does not adequately sample them; if there are data manipulations, then we might never get that data.
Beyond tracking the data, we’ll defend policies to support women’s economic security that we’ve long supported and push back against anything that will harm women and families.
